Swarthmore College Alumni Bulletin 1983-03-01

Living in outer space? Physicist Gerard O’Neill ’50 predicts it will be possible
before the end of this century. More than that—he believes it is imperative.

By Nancy Smith
In a modest office suite over an optom­
etrist’s shop on Nassau Street in Prince­
ton, a small group of very bright people is
planning your future.
This is the home of the Space Studies
Institute, a nonprofit corporation estab­
lished in 1977 to fund projects in space
research without drawing on government
money. The institute is the creation of
Gerard K. O’Neill ’50, a professor of
physics at Princeton University and au­
thor of The High Frontier and 2081: A
Hopeful View o f the Human Future.
O’Neill has blazed into prominence in the
field of national and international space
planning within the past fifteen years,
notably because of his advocacy of the
feasibility of space colonies.
“We can colonize space, and do so
without robbing or harming anyone or
polluting anything,” says O’Neill. “The
technology is available now, and if work
is begun soon, nearly all our industrial
activity could be moved away from the
Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than
a century.”
But putting humans in spate is only
the means to more ambitious goals.
O’Neill believes that the migration of
people and industry into space will en­
courage self-sufficiency, small-scale gov­
ernmental units, cultural diversity, and a
high degree of independence. These are
themes he returns to again and again in
his writings and his conversation.
Island One, ” which has a circumference o f
about one mile, would house agricultural
areas and industries. Mirrors reflect
sunshine into the habitat.
MARCH, 1983

The walls of the Space Studies Insti­
tute are decorated with large poster-like
paintings of proposed colonies and man­
ufacturing facilities—“Island One,” an
advanced-stage colony, looking rather
like a gigantic sparkplug, surrounded by
farming pods and solar mirrors; delicate
filigree structures stretching thousands of
meters out from a central capsule-shaped
habitat; stacks of donut-like glass struc­
tures containing fields or other agricul­
tural systems. Any reader of science
fiction will recognize the style. But this is
not science fiction. These are serious
scientific blueprints for places in which
people can live and work in outer space,
and the staff of SSI is going to help us get
there if we want to go.
The primary objective of SSI, says
O’Neill, is to conduct and support “lead­
ing-edge research essential to opening the
resources of space for human benefit
within this century. Research supported
by SSI has shown theoretically that there
can be material trapped in the Earth’s
orbit around the sun, material that would
be easy to retrieve and mine.” Another
SSI grant (of $100,000 to Rockwell In­
ternational, builders of the NASA shuttle)
supported the chemistry research for
designing a chemical processing plant for
space. This plant would separate lunar
soil into oxygen, aluminum, and silicon
—and the silicon could be used for solar
cells in a sun-powered satellite. Still
another grant is sponsoring construction
of a prototype mass-driver, an electro­
magnetic launch device. Future massdrivers could project materials from the

moon into space, haul freight between
orbits, or retrieve mineral-rich asteroids.
Not only is all of this possible, it is
financially within our grasp. “Our re­
search has shown,” says O’Neill, “that we
can reach, benefit from, and settle the
High Frontier for an investment cost no
greater than that of such private ventures
as the Alaska pipeline.”
The concept of space colonization is
not new, and O’Neill directs the curious
to the inspired work of Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, J. D.
Bernal, and Dandridge Cole as the most
“accurately prophetic.” But serious work
on human habitation in space, he notes,
could not have begun earlier than 1969,
when the first Apollo samples of lunar
soil were returned to the Earth and their
possibilities determined.
In that same year» and purely as a
classroom exercise, O’Neill asked the
students in his elementary physics class
the question: “Is a planetary surface
really the best place for an expanding
technological civilization?” After exten­
sive review, the pupils concluded that the
answer might be “no,” and that an ideal
solution pointed to extraterrestrial manu­
facturing facilities—or space colonies.
For several years thereafter, O’Neill
pursued this line of research on his own.
The more he looked, the more the facts
and figures kept falling into place. “You
start working on something, expecting
the numbers to shoot it down, and
instead the numbers keep coming up
right.” By 1974, O’Neill was convinced
that workers operating from a space

colony could construct solar satellite
power stations using materials obtained
from lunar soil, soil which could be
removed at a relatively low cost by a
mass-driver based on the moon. The
power stations could then be located in
orbit and could supply energy for the
Earth through low-density microwave
beams.
O’Neill’s work took a giant step for­
ward when the first conference on space
manufacturing was held at Princeton in
1974. In that same year he published an
article called “The Colonization of Space”
in Physics Today—the first technical
article on the subject, and one which had
an explosive effect on the scientific com­
munity and the general public. A door
was opened which could never again be
closed.
In 1975 government support for the
research began, a much larger conference
was held at Princeton, and a serious
summer study program was initiated,
sponsored by NASA, Stanford Uni­
versity, and the American Society for
Engineering Education. All O’Neill’s find­
ings from his six years of calculation at
Princeton were given to the summer
study for examination. The participants
in the study concluded with a unanimous
endorsement of the basic concept of
space colonization, and recommended
that concrete projects be initiated. With
the establishment of the Space Studies
Institute, work on projects such as the
mass-driver and the chemical processing
plant got under way. O’Neill and his
colleagues hope to have a model of the
mass-driver ready to display to the next
space manufacturing conference in May.
While the primary rationale for space
colonies is economic—the need for profit­
able earnings and for clean energy sources
on Earth—much of the popular interest
in them is based on a fascination with the
Earthlike possibilities for the colonies
and on their implications for human
development and progress.
In 1977 O’Neill published The High
Frontier, “the space colonists’ Bible” (re­
issued in 1982, with new preface and
appendices). In it, he outlined what we
might expect to see in our own lifetimes.
The prototypical colony could be shaped
like a sphere; it will spin to create an
artificial sense of gravity, rotating every
twenty to sixty seconds. Inside the colony
there will be “valleys” containing houses,
soil, streams, forests, village clusters, and
gardens. The constant sunlight of space
can be let in for a day-length chosen by
the colonists, following a 24-hour cycle.

Baseball-sized payloads o f lunar minerals
leave the mass-driver to be caught at
manufacturing stations in space.

Simply by varying the day-length, the
weather and climate can be varied; one
colony may be balmy and tropical, an­
other crisp and Alpine; eventually, scien­
tists should be able to create Earthlike
clouds and rainstorms.
The first establishment will be a mas­
sive laboratory, a jumping-off stage for
further building and development. This
will be a “small” unit, housing about

2,000 pioneers and technicians, and
would be located in a high circular orbit
between the Earth and the moon. As
much bigger colonies would be more
expensive per acre, later colonies will
remain village-size, or at least expand to
no more than 20,000 to 50,000 inhabit­
ants. It is absolutely fundamental to
O’Neill’s thinking that space colonies
remain manageable, even intimate.
While he is meticulous and precise
about scientific details, he is cautious in
making predictions—or suggestions—
about life styles. “I’m very careful not to
specify anything about the details of how
people will choose to live. That’s up to
them. I’m trying to provide a techno­
logical option which people can use in
order to develop their own ways of
living.”
In addition to the initial laboratory
satellite, there would be a small outpost
on the moon itself. Samples of lunar soil
brought back to Earth have contained
more than 12 percent aluminum, along
with iron, magnesium, and other metals.
Lunar soil is also rich in oxygen, which
could be combined with hydrogen to
make water or simply used for breathing.
Once the labor force is in place, con­
tinued construction in space will be ex­
pensive. Zero gravity and the availability
of limitless sunlight which is directly
convertible to electricity will greatly re­
duce the costs and ease the work. Silicon,
needed for solar cells, is very expensive
and rare on earth, but plentiful on the
moon. Electrical energy provided by the
first working solar satellite will allow the
project to begin paying for itself.
The lynchpin in the plan for mining
moondust is the mass-driver. It is a
computer-designed array of drive coils
forming an accelerator 250 meters long.
It accelerates moving coils called “buck­
ets,” and the buckets carry baseball-size
payloads of sintered lunar soil. When
each bucket reaches a velocity of l x/i
miles per second, its load is released to
continue soaring alone on its way. The
moon minerals are then caught, separated
into components, and used to construct
the solar satellite.
“Only the initial colonies would use
lunar materials,” says O’Neill. “After
that the colonists could chip away at the
asteroids which are rich in iron, nickel,
carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen.” With
the eventual mining of the asteroids, he
sees an almost unlimited future for man’s
expansion into the universe.
Though Senator William Proxmire
sniped at O’Neill, saying, “Not one penny
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

for this nutty fantasy!” O’Neill’s NASA
funding for the work continued until he
decided, in 1980, that following the twists
and turns of government policy was too
constraining for research. Hence SSI.
O’Neill’s projections have captured the
imagination of a large band of enthu­
siasts. Since the publication of his first
paper he has been carried along on a
wave of public awareness and interest.
He is a sought-after speaker at colleges
and universities, has appeared on TV and
spoken on the radio, and has been written
up in scores of newspapers and maga­
zines. In addition to his regular academic
work at Princeton and the time he puts in
as president of SSI, O’Neill clocks about
twenty hours flying time each month,
piloting his own Cherokee Arrow to and
from personal appearances around the
country.
He has a Diamond Badge for his ex­
ploits in gliding, including soaring 500
kilometers during an eight-hour flight.
As a child, he was fascinated by aviation.
“I loved planes, as lots of kids do, and at
the same time I was very taken by the
science fiction movies of the ’40s—the
Buck Rogers era. You must remember
that for someone of my age—I graduated
from high school in 1944—my formative
years were tremendously affected by the
Second World War. I joined the Navy on
my seventeenth birthday.” In the Navy he
was trained as a radar technician. Later
he studied physics at Swarthmore, and
was introduced to the pleasures of as­
tronomy by Peter van de Kamp. “After
the war, information started coming out
about the V-2 rockets; it was obvious
that someone would soon go into orbit.”
Today O’Neill is internationally known
not only as a designer of space systems
but also for his research in one of the
most productive areas of physics—that
in which beams of high energy particles
are fired head-on at one another. Among
his accomplishments is the development
of storage rings for high energy particle
accelerators—devices that produce the
highest energy particle collisions ever
achieved by man.
During the ’60s O’Neill became in­
trigued by the opportunities of space.
When NASA was expanding its Apollo

project to include personnel who were
not military test pilots, he applied (along
with about 1,000 others) to be a scientistastronaut. He reached the short list in
1967 but the entire program was severely
cut by Congress just one month later.
O’Neill is not a man to waste time on
regrets: “I don’t think any of the things I
could have done as an astronaut would
have made nearly as much of a contri­
bution as I can hope to make with the
humanization of space.”
The space colony concept is not with­
out its critics. Aside from those who
simply think the idea won’t ever get off
the ground, there are others who believe
that O’Neill is far too optimistic in his
cost estimates, or that he has not thor­
oughly evaluated all the problems of
trying to create a completely controlled
ecology. But for O’Neill the idea is not a
whim or a luxury. It is a process which
must take place to prevent the catastro­
phe of the “steady-state” society, a world
threatened by limited resources, energy
shortages, famine, police states, and mili­
tary disaster. But he isn’t offering a
Utopia. “Many people are excited by
space colonies because they feel that
somehow the personal ills of humankind
will fall away when we can live in them.

I’m afraid I see no reason why that
should be true. People in space will be
going through the same sorts of personal
problems that they have here.
“But the space-colony concept does
address the big issues: two major sources
of conflict here on the surface of the
Earth. One of them is territoriality and
the other is scale.
“Territoriality first. If you read African
Genesis, or look at history, or read a
daily newspaper, you see examples of
military conflict based on territoriality.
No nation on Earth can enlarge its land
area without crossing a border and going
to war, and it’s an insoluble problem
because land cannot be expanded, moved,
or changed. But space colonies are creatable. If you become cramped, you can
build a new colony, make new territory,
without going to war.
“And I think the question of scale is a
very important one. The evidence is that
human beings can get along with each
other perfectly well when they are in
community-size units, when they sense

This drawing depicts a residential area in
the “Crystal Palace, ”a maximum sunlit
agricultural habitat.

The Swarthmore College Bulletin (USPS 530-620),
of which this is Volume LXXX, number 4, is pub­
lished in September, November, December, March,
May, and August by Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081. Second class postage paid at
Swarthmore, PA and additional mailing offices.
Postmaster: Send address changes to Swarthmore
College Bulletin, Swarthmore, PA 19081.

MARCH, 1983

3

that real power is in their own hands and
not elsewhere. I think that a lot of the
serious problems of government—of the
remoteness of government, of disinterest
of the governing in the governed—are
problems of scale.”
When corresponding with an illustrator
for one of his publications, O’Neill urged
the artist to “keep the scale small and
human. The whole idea is not to be
monumental. The shops should be small
—boutiques, bookshops, tiny restau­
rants. . . . ”
O’Neill, who is probably weary of
hearing himself described as trim and
youthful-looking, is a trim and youthful-

looking man of great presence. He is not
particularly tall, but gives the impression
of height and dominance. He is patient
and quiet-voiced, yet leaves his listeners a
little breathless, as though a whirlwind
has passed close by. There is nothing of
the zealot about him, but his calm con­
viction conveys its own dynamic. “The
truth is,” he says, “that technology has
great power, power which can be used
either for good or for bad—and that
means you have a correspondingly great
responsibility for what you do with it. If
you have a powerful tool that can be used
in two ways, you have the responsibility
not to misuse it for ill, and the respon­

sibility not to fail to use it properly by
neglect.”
In the 1970s, according to O’Neill, our
great sins were the sins of omission—
things we could and should have done
but didn’t. Such as? Magnetic flight, for
one thing, a high speed transportation
system based on magnetic levitation that
could carry people at 1,000 m.p.h. It does
not require air around it for flight, so it
can operate almost without drag. It is a
system that would burn no oil, create no
pollution, and have twenty times the
energy efficiency of a jet plane. “For ten
years we did absolutely nothing in this
field while the Germans and the Japanese

Dear Brian and Nancy:
I can understand that you want to hear
from someone who’s working and living
in space before deciding whether to make
the commitment yourselves. According
to your letter, you’ve reached the “finals”
in the selection process now. The next
step will be the admission interview.
After that, if you get an offer, you’ll have
to decide whether to go for the sixmonths’ training.
Then there’s the big step of the first
space flight, the three-weeks’ stay in low
orbit. By now the flight itself is quite
routine; you’ll find that the single-stage
shuttle interior is much like that of one of
the smaller commercial jets; therell be
150 of you traveling together. The gforces will be higher than in commercial
aviation, but still nothing to worry you.
The trip into orbit will take only about
twenty minutes, and then you’ll experi­
ence something really new: zero gravity.
You may feel queasy at first—as if you
were on a ship at sea. The purpose of the
three-week trial period is to sort out cases
of severe space-sickness and to find out
whether you are among those who can
adapt to commuting each day between
normal gravity and zero. That’s impor­
tant because our homes are in gravity
obtained by rotation—here in the colony
we are held to the ground by centrifugal
force, which pulls us to the outer shell of
the habitat. But many of us work in the
construction industry, which is conducted
outside the habitat where there is no
gravity at all. Those who can adapt to
rapid change qualify for higher-paying
jobs. The trial period also gives a person
the chance to decide “this is not for me.”
After the three weeks, you’ll be ready
to transfer to one of the “liners” on its
next trip in.
In the colony orbit, the biggest things

you’ll see will be the solar satellite power
stations being assembled to supply energy
for the earth. Those power stations are
about ten times as big as the colonies
themselves. You won’t see much detail
from the outside of the colonies because
they’re shielded against cosmic rays, solar
flares and meteoroids by a thick layer of
material, mainly slag, which occurs as a
waste product from the processing of
lunar soil to obtain construction mater­
ials.
All the habitats are variations of basic
sphere, cylinder, or ring shapes. We live
in Bernal Alpha, a sphere about 500
meters in diameter whose inside circum­
ference is nearly a mile at its “equator.”
We have track races and bicycle races
that use the ring pathway. That path
wanders all the way round, generally
following the equator, and near it is our
little river. Bernal Alpha rotates once
every 32 seconds, so there is earth gravity
at the equator. The land forms a big

curving valley, rising from the equator to
45-degree “lines of latitude” on each side.
The land area is mostly covered with lowrise, terraced apartments, shopping walk­
ways, and small parks. Many services,
light industries, and shops are located
underground or in a central low-gravity
sphere, or are steeply terraced, because
we like to preserve most of our land area
for grass and parks. Our sunshine comes
in at an angle near 45 degrees, rather like
midmorning or midafternoon on earth.
The day-length, and therefore the climate,
are set by our choice of when to admit
sunlight. We keep Canaveral time, but
two other colonies near us are on differ­
ent times. All the colonies serve the same
industries, so the production operations
run twenty-four hours a day, three shifts,
but since the workers are on different
times, no one has to work the night shift.
Alpha has a Hawaiian climate, so we
lead an indoor-outdoor life all year. Our
apartment is about the same size as our

4

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

plunged ahead. If we do something with
magnetic flight in this country, it’s going
to be with imported technology.”
In 2081: A Hopeful View o f the Human
Future O’Neill discusses magnetic flight
and a great many other delights and
conveniences to come: robots in our
homes and our factories, bionic medicine,
centralized computer services, cities with
controlled climates, holographic visits by
telephone, and, of course, space colonies
containing all the finest pleasures of life
on Earth. But above all, O’Neill paints a
picture of a world filled with possibilities,
in which technology can be used both to
widen our horizons and to reduce our

institutions to a more human scale.
In 2081, as in all of O’Neill’s projects,
“hopeful” is the important word. “I was
led to start thinking about space colonies
originally by reflecting on the predictions
of the Club of Rome—the idea of the
limits of growth and the necessity of
giving up personal freedom in order to
live within a supposed rigorous set of
physical laws. It seemed to me that the
whole point of opening up the resources
of space is to escape from that set of
consequences.”
O’Neill is impressed by the numbers of
young people who speak to him after his
lectures and tell him the same thing: His

lectures, and the reading they have done
on space colonies, have given them new
hope, new zest, new enthusiasm.
“Where people are involved,” says
O’Neill, “there is always the potential for
good and for evil, but there seems a good
chance that opening the door into space
could improve the human condition on
Earth. Relieved even a little from the
drive to squabble with other nations for
the diminishing resources of our planet,
we could hope for a more peaceful future
than will otherwise be our lot. I think
there is reason to hope that the opening
of the new High Frontier will challenge
the best that is in us.”

old house on earth, and it has a garden
Alpha was one of the first colonies to b'
built, so our trees have had time to grow
to a good size.
You’ll notice immediately the small
scale of things, but for a town of 10,000
people, we’re in rather good shape for
entertainment: four small cinemas, quite
a few good small restaurants and many
amateur theatrical and musical groups. It
takes only a few minutes to travel over to
the neighboring colonies, so we visit
them often for movies, concerts or just a
change of climate. There are ballet pro­
ductions on the big stage out in the lowgravity recreational complex that serves
all the colonies. Ballet in one-tenth gravity
is beautiful to watch: dreamlike, and very
graceful. You’ve seen it on TV, but the
reality is even better. Of course, right here
in Alpha we have our own low-gravity
swimming pools, and our clubrooms for
human-powered flight. (You’d reallyenjoy riding a “bicycle” with flapping wings
instead of wheels.) Quite often Jenny and
I like to climb the path to the “North
Pole” and pedal out along the zerogravity axis of the sphere for half an hour
or so, especially after sunset, when we
can see the soft lights from the pathways
below.
To go on with our situation, it’s a
comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables
and fruit are in season all the time,
because there are agricultural cylinders
for each month of the year, each with its
own day-length. We grow avocados and
papayas in our own garden and never
need to use insecticide sprays.
You asked whether we feel isolated.
Some of us do get “island fever” to some
degree, probably because we’re really
first-generation immigrants; it never
seems to bother the kids that were born
here. When you sign your contract there

are clauses that help quite a bit, though.
One is the provision for free telephone
and videophone time to the earth. An­
other sets up free transportation to earth
and return on a space-available basis.
Jenny and I took a six months’ leave after
our first three years here. Our visit was
luxurious, because our salaries are paid
in part in earth currency; we’re both
employed, Jenny as a turbine blade in­
spector and I in precision assembly. Our
housing, food, clothing, and the rest are
purchased in colony currency, so our
earth salaries just accumulate in the
bank. When we went back we had a lot of
money to spend, and even on a luxury
basis we couldn’t go through it in six
months.
We found something, though, that
may help to answer your basic question:
By the time the vacation was nearly over,
we were very ready to come back here.
We missed our own place. Jenny is an
enthusiastic gardener, and though other
people were living in our apartment here
and taking care of the greenery, she
wanted to be at home to enjoy it herself.
And I missed the friends I’d been working
with. I can best describe the other thing
that drew us back by saying that the
space habitats are exciting places to be.
They’re growing and changing so fast
that if you’re away for six months you’ve

missed a lot. Of the people who came
with us, more than half intend to stay
after their five-year contract is up. I
understand that the settlement of Alaska
since its acquisition has had about the
same kind of “stay ratio.”
Now we’re beginning to ask ourselves:
Will we want to retire to earth or not? We
don’t have to face that for another twenty
years, but we can see already that it won’t
be an easy decision. Some of us who are
handy with tools have formed a club to
design and build our own spacecraft—
rather like the home-built aircraft clubs
on earth. We’re thinking of homestead­
ing one of the smaller asteroids, and the
numbers look reasonable. Especially if
our daughter and son-in-law decide to
come along, with the grandchildren, I
think we’re more likely to move farther
out than to go back.
If you do decide to come out, let us
know what flight you’ll be on and we’ll
meet you at the docks. We’d like you to
come to our place for supper, and we’ll be
glad to help you to get settled.

MARCH, 1983

Bernal^lpha/Eolony
6 /2 4 /0 3 ^ * -'
(Reprinted with permission from
The High Frontier by Gerard K. O’Neill.)

5

Astronaut Sally Ride prepares for a
simulated ejection during a training exercise
at the survival training school at Vance Air
Force Base in Oklahoma.
(Photos courtesy of NASA.)

W hen the space shuttle flies in A pril, astronaut Sally R id e ’72 will be on e o f th e crew.

rom the Delaware County Daily
Times of November 21,1969: “Sally
Ride, an 18-year-old sophomore
at Swarthmore College, may one day be
the first woman astronaut but for the
moment she is the number one woman
college tennis player in the East.”
Those words were prophetic indeed.
When NASA’s space shuttle “Challenger”
makes its second flight in late April, Sally
Ride ’72 will become the first American
woman in space. (The Russians sent up
the first woman astronaut, Valentina
Tereshkova, nearly twenty years ago.)
The native Southern Californian came
to Swarthmore as a physics major in 1968
and quickly made a name for herself by
winning back-to-back crowns in the Invi­
tational Eastern Women’s Intercollegiate
Tennis Championships in her freshman
and sophomore years. As it turned out,
she played well enough to consider be­
coming a professional tennis player, re­
turned to California (“where tennis was
easier to play”), and transferred to Stan­
ford University. It was there that she
received two bachelor’s degrees, in Eng­
lish and physics, and her master’s and
doctor’s degrees in physics.
Her break into the astronaut program
came in 1978, when she saw an article in
the Stanford student newspaper in which
NASA was reported to be looking for
shuttle astronauts. More than 8,000 hope­
fuls applied, including 1,544 women.
Thirty-five were selected to join NASA’s
eighth class, six of them women, one of
them Ride.
She completed her training, worked jn
Toronto with Canadian scientists who
developed a “remote arm” for the space
shuttle, and traveled to Australia to visit
tracking stations there.
She served as a capsule communicator
for shuttle flights number two and three,
that is, as the go-between astronaut who
communicates with the shuttle from Mis­
sion Control in Houston, relaying mes­
sages from various ground personnel.
It was during the second flight that
Ride asked the men in space, “When do I
get my turn?”

F

MARCH, 1983

She’s getting her turn fairly early.
Some of the seventy-nine active astro­
nauts, including her husband, Steve Haw­
ley, have been waiting more than ten
years to go into space. Is Steve jealous
that she’s going first? “No,” Ride said.
“The space program has been funded
through the decade of the ’80s and will
include more missions beyond the space
shuttle. He’ll get his turn.”
Commanding her mission will be Navy
Captain Robert Crippen, who flew on
the maiden flight of the first shuttle,
“Columbia,” nearly two years ago. Ride’s
job title will be mission specialist, as will
that of the third astronaut, Air Force Lt.
Col. John M. Fabian. Among other
tasks, the pair will put three satellites into
orbit: two communications satellites and
one to be used for a “rendevous” test.
“We will release the satellite, let it float
free, orbit around it, and use the shuttle’s
mechanical arm to bring it back on
board.” This, she said, will be the first
demonstration that the shuttle has the
capability to retrieve payloads in orbit
for servicing, etc.
Her specialities as an astrophysicist are
X-ray stars (stars which give off high
levels of X-ray radiation) and the manner
in which those rays are absorbed by
clouds in space. These stars are difficult
to study from earth where the rays are
blocked by the atmosphere, so Ride and
other X-ray astronomers usually rely on
space satellites and space-born telescopes
for their raw data. In the future the space
shuttle program is expected to carry into
orbit a large telescope that will be perfect
for studying X-ray stars.
Ride said she had not given much
thought to being a role model as a
woman until her recent selection for the
shuttle program and the ensuing public
relations tours, talks with youngsters at
schools, and press conferences. “I’ve al­
ways followed the space program closely,”
she said. “I could tell you exactly where I
was when John Glenn went into space
and when Neil Armstrong walked on the
moon. I was interested in space but it
wasn’t anything I built a career around.

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Instead I planned to go into research in
physics. I wouldn’t have known how to
prepare for a career as an astronaut even
if it had occurred to me to try, since
women weren’t involved in the space
program at the time.”
Times change, and her years in the
astronaut program and her advice for
anyone hoping to join the program carry
no hint of sexism. “Pick a field you like.
NASA has no requirements that you be
in superb physical shape or great at
anything. There’s no ‘best’field of study,
since the program uses a wide range of
the sciences—physics, biology, geology,
medicine.” She added she hoped she was
not picked because she was a woman but
because she was a scientist.
Commander Crippen put those doubts
to rest in a recent interview. “She’s being
treated no differently from any other
astronaut. She was chosen for the mis­
sion because she’s good.”

By Maralyn Orbison Gillespie ’49

THEY PLAYED
SKY HIGH
The little team that shouldn't proved it could

HWh
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

“This year we should have been a very
weak team,” said Coach Tom Lapinski,
remembering the 31-12 loss against
Trenton State in a preseason scrimmage.
“We had five seniors out for pre­
season practice,” recalls Tri-captain Ed
Pinney ’83. “Three were starters in ’81.
We had lost fifteen men, all but one
defensive lineman, a quarterback, and a
halfback. Eighteen freshmen came out.”
“Initially we thought the problem was
going to be the defensive line,” said Tri­
captain Jim Sanderson ’83. “All of the
defensive line was supposed to return,
but we lost one to an injury, one went to
Rice as an exchange student for a semes­
ter, and two transferred to other insti­
tutions.”
“Last year we had better players,” said
Jim Weber ’84, “but this year we were 8
and 1.”
“The coaches made the most of what
we had,” said Jeff Leiser ’86. “We needed
a tight end so they made one out of a
freshman halfback. Another freshman, a
high school fullback, was converted to an
offensive guard. Where they needed size,
they moved a 222-pound defensive tackle
to the offense and a 232-pound guard to
tackle. A reserve tackle became a center.
Two quarterbacks became wide receivers,
while a starting wide receiver was con­
verted to a right halfback.”
With none of the obvious advantages
going for them, the players agreed early
in the season, “Let’s play one game at a
time.” All but the freshmen remembered
the astonishing 7-2 record of the year
before, with losses to only Lebanon
Valley and the Middle Atlantic Division
III champion, Widener—Swarthmore’s
first winning season since 1966.
The ’82 squad was reminiscent in
numbers of the ’81 squad but not in
MARCH, 1983

experience and ability (according to the
players’ own evaluation). They played
Game No. 1 to a 2-0 win over Moravian,
scoring a safety in the last twenty-eight
seconds of play. As Phoenix reporter Jeff
Gutkowski ’86 saw Freshman Jeff Leiser’s
break through the Moravian line to
smother a punt, his “exertion on that one
play was symbolic of the entire Swarthmore defensive effort of the game. If the
stellar defense continues to play solidly,”
he wrote, “it’s only a matter of time until
Swarthmore’s ‘self-destruct’ offense gets
on track.”
In Game 2 the defense continued to
buy time for the inexperienced offense, as
the defense held Lebanon Valley to 10
yards total scoreless offense and beat
them 14-0. In Game 3 both offense and
defense worked together to down Johns
Hopkins 28-10. The inexperienced offen­
sive line had begun to operate as a
cohesive unit.
By October 9, when Swarthmore beat
Dickinson 14-0, Jim Weber’s front page
article in the Phoenix told the story of the
best football record for the partial season
since 1916,4-0; of the defense which held
its opponent to negative rushing yardage
for the second time in the season and to
83 yards total offense; and of the team
tied for first place in its MAC Division.
Weber pointed out: “The defense (1)
has not given up a touchdown this year;
in fact, it has been 27 quarters since any
team has scored a touchdown on the
defense; (2) has not given up a rushing
touchdown in 45 quarters of play. . . ; (3)
has over the past ten games allowed an
Was winning an embarrassment at
Swarthmore? Not fo r the plucky players,
nor the cheering fans who filled the stands,
nor a young admirer o f Coach Lapinski.

average of just 4.9 points per game to its
opponents (consider that Swarthmore’s
offense averaged 18.2 over the same
period).”
The Gettysburg win the following week
was a big one. “We played sky high,” said
Jim Weber, to an emotional 29-7 victory
over the team that had beaten Widener
the week before.
The Garnet made it a 6-0 season by
defeating Upsala 23-3. The Phoenix sum­
marized (on the back page this time):
“Well, the morals of this story are (a)
Swarthmore isn’t a fairy tale team and (b)
they aren’t to be fooled with.” By the time
the Garnet beat Ursinus 28-14 for its
seventh straight win to make it the first
7-0 team in the 104-year history of
football at Swarthmore (in the two for­
mer best years, 1939 and 1966, the records
were 6-0-1), the Philadelphia Inquirer
and the New York Times had something

to say about the team and the College.
The Garnet had won too many games,
the media said, causing embarrassment
to some people at the academically proud
institution.
“I get the feeling,” Co-captain Sand­
erson was quoted in the Inquirer as
saying, “that this campus resents us hav­
ing a winning team.” The Inquirer con­
tinued: “Members of the football team
say that, for the last two years, students
and faculty members have been publicly
critical of the team, feeling that athletic
success detracts from the school’s aca­
demic reputation. Some players say they
are openly insulted and snubbed. Head
Coach Tom Lapinski says that his team’s

success has spawned anti-football senti­
ment so strong that he might be fired.”
The Inquirer article also reported on a
student-faculty committee that was
formed a year ago “to investigate ‘ten­
sions’ between athletes and non-athletes
on campus.”
The New York Times, in a six-column
story headlined “Swarthmore’s Shake­
spearean Cast and Other Tales,” shored
up its opening premise that “things are
close to normal at Swarthmore these
days” with this paragraph: “Normality in
Swarthmore football has many mean­
ings: It is the current coach, Tom Lapin­
ski, being under fire amid a 7-0 start as
were his predecessors during a 34-game
losing streak a decade ago; it is a 39player roster whose college board scores
were around the mid 1200’s and whose
bodies averaged around 190 pounds and
under 6 feet.” Then it broke the story on
Kevin Lagasse, who had just finished his
second game under his real name; because
his parents did not want him to play
football, he had played the first four
games under the pseudonym “Rockwell
Thisbe.” Lagasse performed the role of
Thisbe when his Shakespeare class was

studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and had borrowed the name.
Four days later the Associated Press
picked up the story that was to find its
way all across the country and as far as
Paris and Johannesburg. The lead was:
“The undefeated Swarthmore College
football team, angered by a review of
athletics at the school, refuses to wear the
College insignia on its helmets.”
The story of Swarthmore’s football
success had become “cute,”as Announcer
Douglas Kiker described it, after NBCTV News sent him to the campus to
investigate. His report appeared on Fri­
day, November 12, at 6:30 P.M. EST.
Saturday at noon CBS-TV Sports fea­
tured the team and the institution on a
three-minute segment of a half-hour show
in which football at Swarthmore was
contrasted to football at Arizona State,
scheduled to come off probation in De­
cember.
The Philadelphia Daily News reported
Kiker as saying after his visit to the
campus: “Swarthmore is such a center of
Quaker intellectualism. They’re taught to
examine everything. That’s why they
examined the football team and its suc-

SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

cess. We were stopping students at ran­
dom in front of the cafeteria, asking them
what they thought of the football team.
One told me: ‘It’s like Jean Paul Sartre
said, . . .’ and he rattled off some quote.
It’s not often you find that happening.”
His counterpart at CBS, Bob Mansbach, after talking to students, faculty,
administrators, coaches, and players,
was reported by the Daily News to have
said: “All we’re missing is the alumni—
and James Michener wasn’t available
this week. Nor the Governor of Massa­
chusetts, the three Nobel winners, nor the
Senator from Michigan.”
Swarthmore helped fill the void in the
media created by the strike in the Na­
tional Football League, and as the Bal­
timore Sun commented: “Who needs the
NFL? Send Swarthmore to the Super
Bowl.”
The media’s stories were “cute,” occa­
sionally inaccurate, frequently distorted;
but they almost all made these telling
points: Swarthmore is a prestigious aca­
demic institution; its football players
average college board scores in the 1200’s;
all of the nine team members who gradu­
ated last year are now in law, dental, or
business schools, or plan to attend in
September, 1983; Swarthmore football
players, none on athletic scholarships,
play for the fun of it; and the team (when
MARCH, 1983

Widener was favored “by a nose”to win the M AC Championship, and
squad size and depth did overwhelm the Garnet’s emotional edge
(whipped up by Lapinski at half time) to a 24-7 defeat in the mud.

“Go Swat,"even a banner in Greek and a cheer beginning “Sophocles, Pericles, Peloponnesian Wars; X 2, Y2, H2 SO 4 , ”added to a half-time
contemplative moment fo r Eddie Meehan, could not hold back Widener in the battle fo r the Middle Atlantic Conference Championship.

the articles appeared) was 7 and 0.
(For a presentation of some of the
controversial and philosophical issues
involved in football at Swarthmore,
please read the second part of this foot­
ball feature, “Will Success Spoil Swarth­
more?” on page fourteen.)
As the media exploited “normality” at
Swarthmore, the Garnet continued to
win. It took a 25-yard field goal with just
1:45 left in the game to beat Western
Maryland 12-10. Perhaps the team had
been caught thinking ahead to the fol­
lowing week when it would face Widener
in a showdown for the conference cham-

A supportive father comforts Ed Meehan ’84
after Ursinus. Later Halfback Meehan and
four teammates were named to the first
All-Conference team: Ed Pinney ’83 OT,
Dom Lepone ’85 LB, Jim Sanderson ’83
DB, and John Walsh ’83 DE. Lapinski was
voted MAC (south) Coach o f the Year.
12

pionship. The Delaware County Daily
Times billed the game as the Battle of
Route 320. On November 13 chartered
busloads of the College community
crowded into the Widener stands.
In eight games Swarthmore had given
up only two touchdowns to its oppo­
nents’offense; it had not beaten Widener
since 1969 when Widener was PMC.
“We’re not the better team on paper,”
said Lapinski. “Widener is. We’re actu­
ally weaker this year than last year on
paper. Emotionally we’re higher than last
year. Emotion has made the difference.”
“It was the game we were waiting for,”
said Jeff Selverian, freshman defensive
tackle, knowing it would probably be the
last football game the two institutions
would play because of a MAC realign­
ment scheduled for the fall of 1983.
When the last mud-splattered play was
run, Academia’s Team lost 24-7; the
impossible dream had ended.
As Lapinski commented after the
game: “The numbers wore us down. . . .
They were just too big for us, too many
for us.”
“We never expected to achieve what
we did,” said Sean Crowley ’85 in retro­
spect.
“We won six games in a row last year,”
said Jeff Seagraves ’84. “I sat down with
the schedule and asked myself how in hell
we were going to do it again this year, and
we won eight games in a row.”
The answer to how the outnumbered,
outsized team with its many inexperi­
enced players, playing out of position,
did it, they say, is the coach and his staff.
Lapinski is lauded by the players for
his play-making astuteness and his abil­
ity to motivate the team. “He’s a brilliant
offensive play-caller,” says one member
of the offense. “We would get six to seven
brand new offensive plays each week.”
“The coaching staff would totally re­
vise our blocking schemes each week,

with twenty new pages of plays to add to
our play book, which was thick to start
with.”
“No one in the league has as compli­
cated and intricate an offense and de­
fense.”
The team had the plays, and it also had
the drive to win, attributable also, the
players said, to the coach. “He gets the
adrenalin flowing so much you can’t help
but get excited.”
“He’s inspiring. I look at how much he
puts into it, and I want to give all I have.
He’s in his office all hours going over
films and scouting reports, working out
the next game’s strategies.”
Lapinski, who played a half dozen
positions on the University of Delaware
team 1962-66, is a full-time biology
teacher in a Wilmington, Delaware, high
school. He was given the job of bringing
the Swarthmore football program out of
an eight-year slump that included a 29game losing streak. His first seasons were
1-7 and 1-7-1. By 1977 he was 4-4-1, then
4-5, 4-4-1, 4-5, and in 1981 7-2. During
the first twenty-one games he coached, he
was 2-17-2; during the most recent games
he coached, he has been 18-5, and four of
those losses were to nationally-ranked
teams.
With an average of fewer than forty
players out for the team year after year,
success, explains Lapinski, “depends up­
on not getting injured. In ’81 and ’82
we’ve had two back-to-back seasons in
which injuries have been minimal.”
Lapinski’s weekly Sunday schedule
highlights his coaching methods. Before
noon he is at his desk doing the routine
paper work of reports, statistics, and
records, and his three assistants begin
looking at yesterday’s game films. By
four o’clock staff members get together
to work until midnight planning strate­
gies for tackling the next opponent.
“First we look at personnel. How big are
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE GOLDBLATT ’67 AND MARTIN NATV1G.

they and how fast? Where can you create
a mismatch (one-on-one where you can
beat them on a certain play)? We try to
figure out every adjustment they can
make to any formation we use. We will
devise 16 to 25 formations for each game.
Most of our opponents play personnel
football; Widener, for example, uses only
four formations.”
Lapinski sums it up: “If you can gather
what your opponents are doing with their
personnel and predict where they are
going to be, give them the bait, and let
them buy it, then you can take it away
MARCH, 1983

and catch them with their pants down.”
The computer is an essential tool to the
coaches, and 25- to 30-foot-long print­
outs of data, much of it secured by
scouts, enable them to predict regularly
with 70 percent success (they claim 96
percent against Upsala in ’79 when
Swarthmore pulled an unexpected 14-3
win).
Swarthmore also scouts itself, an un­
common practice. “Using data from film
and charting sheets (every play, defensive
and offensive, is charted the way it was
run), we put ourselves through the com­

puter in an attempt to find out what our
offensive tendencies were. We hope that
our opponent does the same thing. Then
we try to deviate from those tendencies.”
Lapinski further documents the ef­
fectiveness of his scouts with this ex­
ample: Three years ago Villanova, as part
of a study of its scouting procedures,
asked to borrow Swarthmore’s scouting
reports, along with those from the Uni­
versity of Pittsburgh and the University
of Wisconsin. When Villanova returned
the reports to Lapinski, he was told that
Swarthmore’s were the most thorough of
the three.
Commenting on his players’ affirma­
tions that he was the reason for their
Rocky-like season, Lapinski said: “Char­
acter is caught, not taught. If you teach in
a disciplined fashion, you will get a
disciplined team. Some people call it
conservatism: The rules are set; here is
your assignment.” His players, and his
MAC colleagues who named him Coach
of the Year, call it first-class coaching.
The ’82 season is one the players and
many other Swarthmoreans are going to
remember the rest of their lives. Never
has the media paid so much attention to a
Swarthmore team. An alumnus in New
York reported that early Monday morn­
ing conversations in his law office would
start off: “Well, how’d Swarthmore do
Saturday?” College administrators’ mail
was thick with letters from alumni asking
what was going on. Alumni sent coach
and captains their congratulations. Even
people on campus became accustomed to
reporters with cameras or pads and pen­
cils wandering around Parrish and the
Field House interviewing athlete and
non-athlete.
At the end of it all, Jeff Seagraves
could still say: “It’s great to play football
at Swarthmore. There’s no high pressure.
It’s still fun to go out and play where the
emphasis is on doing the best you can—
winning will follow.”

he headlines told a strange story:
“Football surge hurting Swarth­
more’s image,”“College shuns win­
ning,” “Winning riles folks at Swarth­
more,” “Winning tarnishes academic re­
putation.”
A myth has been created and we seem
to be stuck with it. Swarthmore may
forever be the college which didn’t want
to have a winning football team.
For a brief time, the story was a hot
item on sports pages and in syndicated
columns across the country. Even in the
funnies: For five days Tank McNamara,
the so-called Doonesbury of sports car­
toons, narrated the dilemma of the staff
and students of Swinburne University—
“an exclusive private institution”—who
were deeply embarrassed by their foot­
ball team’s undefeated season.
All of this unexpected publicity was
entertaining—up to a point. On campus,
reaction took the form of startled amuse­
ment. But many alumni, distressed by
reports of lack of support for the team,
wrote and telephoned to voice their con­
cern. The general burden of their com­
ment was: “What’s wrong with you peo­
ple? We applaud excellence on the part of
Swarthmore students in any endeavor! ”
Presumably the media would have
paid less attention to Swarthmore had it
not been for the NFL strike. As it was,
the reporters and camera crews descended
in force, ravenous for copy and desperate
for “color.” Lured initially by the Gar­
net’s second miracle season, they stayed
to elaborate on the “man-bites-dog”
theme of the college which felt a winning
football team was incompatible with its
academic reputation.
Does the Swarthmore community
really disapprove of winning football
games? Of course not! The crowd of
students, faculty, staff, and parents brav­
ing icy wind and muddy grounds at
Widener University on November 13th
certainly weren’t there to see the Little
Quakers lose! But recent committee
studies and reports concerning athletics
—specifically, perceived tensions between
some athletes and the general college
community—have focused attention on
the relationship between sports and the
rest of the curriculum. These tensions
(now generally acknowledged to be a
thing of the past) were seized upon by the
media and magnified to crisis propor­
tions.
One example, nationally publicized,
was the matter of the “SC” logo on the
football team’s helmets. According to the
press, the members of the team were so
dismayed by lack of support from the

T

14

Will Success
Spoil
Swarthmore?
Last fall the glare of national publicity revealed
that not all the clashes took place on the field.
By Nancy Smith
College community that they refused to
affix the insignia, declaring they weren’t
playing for Swarthmore but for them­
selves and their coach. In fact, the insig­
nia has not been used for at least two
seasons, a point easily proven by photo­
graphs of the team in action in ’80 and
’81. The players said the letters kept
slipping awry or peeling off and that they
weren’t attractive; there was no malice
involved in not wearing them. After this
season’s brouhaha about helmet insignia,
some team members are enjoying design­
ing an altogether new logo for future use.
Football team members were them­
selves among the first to refute the media
mythology. Interviewed on campus, de­

fensive end Jeff Seagraves ’84 said, “The
Inquirer made us look like a bunch of cry
babies. There may have been problems
with the College community in the past,
but that’s over. We’re making real prog­
ress now.” Sean Crowley ’85, offensive
lineman, declared, ‘’You can’t ask for
more support than we had from the kids
this year.” Eddie Meehan ’84 summed it
up: “We’re pretty fed up with this con­
troversy. We just want to go out and
enjoy the respect of the community and
represent the College. If the insignia
means so much to people, 111 wear it on
my forehead.”
On November 1, 1982, the Philadel­
phia Inquirer carried an article by columSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Garnet players celebrate scoring a safety
which gave them a 12-10 edge in the game
against Western Maryland.

nist Chuck Newman which was particu­
larly irresponsible in its representation of
faculty members as critical of the team
and the coach and unsupportive of their
efforts. Associate Professor of History
Robert S. DuPlessis and Thomas Finholt
’83, both of whom were misquoted in the
article, wrote a three-page letter to the
newspaper protesting that the quotations
attributed to them “were taken out of
context or truncated.” The letter, which
was never printed, concluded with the
following: “Students at Swarthmore will
continue to play football well, dance
well, study well, and even take a break
now and then. But none will expect that
their particular interests and activities
qualify her or him for special adulation.
There’s an interesting story to be written
about how Swarthmore students manage
to combine an extraordinary range of activi­
ties with academic excellence, without
expecting any special attention. We
thought this was the story we were giving
Mr. Newman.”
The newspaper did publish a letter
from senior Suellen Heath: “The issue on
our campus is not that there is no support
for our team or that there is not enough
support, but that the media have come in
and focused on the few people who are
indifferent to football rather than the
majority who think our winning streak is
pretty fantastic and lots of fun to be a
part of.”
A hand-made banner which hung in
the locker room on the day of the
Widener game said it best: “To beat or
not to beat. There is no question.”
But the myth dies hard, and the in­
sistence even now that Swarthmore is
either about to give up football, fire the
coach, or both, continues to haunt the
College community.
The relationship of athletics, andfcoi
the football program in particular, to the
rest of the College has been a topic for
philosophic consideration on campus for
a long time. “Football has been asso­
ciated throughout its history at Swarth­
more with debates about what sort of
college we wanted to have,” observes
Robert C. Bannister, professor of his­
tory. “This is not a new issue. If you look
at the College at the time of the intro­
duction of the Honors Program in the
early twenties, and look at it again a
decade later, you can see that the biggest
change isn’t so much in Honors as in the
MARCH, 1983

football schedule.”
sides. It was alleged too that football
Recently, some members of the Col­ figured prominently (though not exclu­
lege community have been critical of sively) in a separate and unconstructive,
what they perceive to be a new era of even destructive, campus subculture.
professionalism and intensity in athletics
There was general agreement that the
at Swarthmore, an escalation of recruit­ pressures and practices of recruitment
ment activities, particularly in football.
for football contributed critically to this
To use a popular expression, there is some fear that there has been a deliberate
performance.
attempt to “change the character of the
The Bannister subcommittee noted
place.”
that the “tensions are widely perceived to
In August, 1981, then-President The­
be unacceptable, particularly at an insti­
odore Friend charged the Committee on
tution with Swarthmore’s traditions and
Physical Education and Athletics (a
goals. Interviews with varsity athletes
standing committee of the faculty chaired
confirmed the fact that many, especially
by Harold Pagliaro, professor of English,
males in the contact sports, feel stig­
and composed of faculty, students, and
matized and alienated and to some de­
administrators) with three important top­ gree isolated by what they perceive as
ics for review:
negative stereotyping and lack of support
from
other members of the College com­
II Intercollegiate athletics: What is
munity.”
(It is important to note here
the appropriate balance between full­
time and part-time coaching in inter­ that only 17.4 percent of the students who
responded to a College-wide question­
collegiate sports? Between varsity and
naire considered the problems at Swarth­
club teams? Between intercollegiate
more
to be “worse than elsewhere.”)
sports and the intramural program?
On
the other hand, large numbers of
2. Social integration: How may such
social and personal tensions as are per­ non-athletes cited as a cause of the
ceived to exist between athletes and non­ tension the “in-group exclusiveness of
athletes on and off the field—i.e., in the
athletes, both as individuals and as groups,
dining
hall, in fraternities, at parties, etc. ”
be reasonably reduced?
Further, resentment was reported among
3. Athletic recruitment: What ought
some male athletes that too much at­
to be the relation of the athletic program
tention and too many resources were
to admissions?
directed to football at the expense of
The first two of these topics were other sports. (This was qualified as “per­
assigned to subcommittees for discussion. haps better described as a peeve than a
The first subcommittee was chaired by source of tension.”)
Charles E. Gilbert, professor of political
Another dimension is the element of
science, the second by Robert Bannister.
female vs. male athletes. Historically,
The third topic was referred to the Com­ some tension here may be a legacy of
mittee on Admissions and Scholarships,
attempts (now accomplished) to achieve
chaired by Patrick Henry, professor of parity between women’s and men’s sports.
religion. Each of the reports ultimately
There have been suggestions that the
presented by these groups reflected a
“segregation” or “isolation” of the foot­
compromise of differing views, but they
ball players has been thrust upon them,
underscored areas of common concern.
and indeed certain logistical circumstances
It is important to emphasize here that
tend to foster separation. Prospective
the “campus tensions” referred to in the
team members are frequently given “spe­
following excerpts peaked in 1980-81
cial” campus tours by members of the
and have receded dramatically since then.
current team when they come to Swarth­
Also, by the time a problem becomes so
more as candidates for admission. By the
serious that committees have been con­
time of freshmen orientation, the football
vened to investigate it, naturally-occur­
squad has already been on campus for
ring curative or restorative forces have
nearly a week. While their new classmates
begun to take effect. Pendulums swing in
are exploring the Ville, touring dorms,
short arcs at Swarthmore.
and getting to know each other, the
Of the concerns identified by the com­
football players and other fall team ath­
mittee and subcommittees, perhaps the
letes are busy with practice and already
most disquieting was the tension found
eating their meals out of phase with other
to exist between football players (or a
freshmen.
circle or circles in which football players
David A. Walter ’62, associate dean of
are prominent) and other social and
admissions, believes that some contactintellectual interests. There were allega­
sport athletes have the impression they
tions of aggressive intolerance on all
are regarded as alienated by their peers
15

and professors. “True or not, it’s an
unhappy thought, but they may feel
unwelcome and ostracised.” To the argu­
ment that athletes have an excellent
record of graduation, he replies: “We use
graduation as a yardstick for survival.
But have they really survived happily
while in College? Has their education
been affected? Have we done our best for
them? We have to be very careful that we
don’t force them to be exclusive.”
The concept of a “football subculture”
is troubling to many people. There are
many sub-sets or interest groups at
Swarthmore—musicians, feminists, computerniks, members of religious organi­
zations. While musicians are recruited as
good students who are also musicians,
there is a persistent supposition that
football players are recruited first as
football players without adequate regard
to academic qualifications. The report of
the committee chaired by Patrick Henry
stated: “The committee’s discussions, and
our interviews... have persuaded us that
most campus suspicion of lowered admis­
sions standards centers on the football
team.” However, in a letter written to the
Phoenix Mr. Henry emphasized: “Our
report carefully and circumstantially re­
futes that suspicion.”
Athletic recruiting is another contro­
versial topic. The extent of recruiting
activities at Swarthmore among the var­
ious sports varies widely. In some cases a
coach does little more than send a letter
or two to a prospective candidate, while
in other cases hundreds of hours of a
coach’s time are spent specifically in
recruiting. Overall, athletic recruiting at
Swarthmore is still low-key, and several
recruited students indicated that this lowkey approach attracted them to the Col­
lege. Dean of Admissions Bob Barr
reports that approximately 10 percent of
the applicant pool learned of Swarth­
more initially through athletic recruit­
ment contacts.
All the evidence suggests that recruit­
ing across the country has become gen­
erally intense and integral to coaching,
that it is not at all limited to football or to
men’s sports, and that it is accepted, with
or without enthusiasm, by the coaching
staffs as a fact of professional life.
Coaches of major men’s and women’s
sports say categorically that Swarthmore
could not successfully compete in them
without serious attention to recruiting;
very few of the outstanding players in
most sports today are “walk-ons,” i.e.,
not recruited in some sense or degree.
Recruiting pressures are most demand­
ing in football if only because of the size
16

TANK AFNAMARA

by Jeff Millar & Bill Hinds

IOSIMG AX ROOm i
IS UOW WE HERE AV
SWINBURNE REJECT
AMERICAN MipPlE-CLASS
VALUES.

I

NOWTUETEAM'S UNBEATEN.
HAVE YOU
WHO?E ?
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CONSIDERED \ TUAT TACKY
CUANTG OF ’WE'RE NUMBER TRANSFERRING?] AMERICAN
574.' NOBODY GOES TO TUE w
-7 -— ^ MlPPLE-CLAEG
GAMES A N Y M O R E ^
imRjff SUCCESS ETUIC. MAS
T r i SR
Ye s , Xknew gefönt r joined
tue team TUAT tue SNOBS at

MOU 1WINKI LIKE WEARING BUT MY INTERCEPTION
THIS BAG TO LECTURES? X
BOUNCED OFF AN OPPONENT S
SWINBURNE TREASURE ITS
ACTUALLY TRlEP ID TUROW
UAND FDR A10UCMPCWIN.
LOSING? FOOTBALL TR&WTiON • TUE LAGT GAME.
TALK ABOUT G N A K E ^ T

Copyright, 1982, Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

of the squads. Further, Swarthmore com­
petes for players against many institutions
with which it could not compete seriously
in games.

According to last year’s report of the
Committee on Admissions and Scholar­
ships: “Athletes are not misled about
what they should expect at Swarthmore,
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

although some speak feelingly about
their surprise at discovering disdain for
their involvement and accomplishments
in athletics.” The report continues: “We
believe that the football coach, the De­
partment of Physical Education and Ath­
letics, and the Admissions Office are
sensitive to the paramount need for
keeping recruiting efforts within the gen­
eral framework of College admissions
policy.”
The question of balancing part-time
and full-time appointments for coaching
was considered with relation to all sports
at all levels but focused most sharply on
football because of an unusual proposal.
In 1981 a concerned alumnus offered to
fund a five-year experiment to re-estab­
lish the head football coach’s job as a
full-time teaching post (the full-time po­
sition had been eliminated in 1975). The
person hired would have been expected
to coach at least one other sport (in the
spring) and to teach physical education
courses. This proposal, designed to inte­
grate football more effectively into the
life of the College and to broaden the
range of recruiting, would have elimi­
nated the part-time position now occupied
by Tom Lapinski, whose principal em­
ployment is as a biology teacher at a high
school ii^Wilmington, Delaware.
The offer (and the tensions mentioned
earlier) provided tempting grist for the
rumor mill. Although Swarthmore em­
ployed a full-time football coach regu­
larly through 1974, the 1981 proposal was
viewed by some on campus as an attempt
to upgrade football, to give it greater
prominence than it already enjoyed.
Others saw in it a Machiavellian scheme
to fire the coach, since the salary range of
the position might not have been at­
tractive to Lapinski. While all three
reports found merit in the idea, it was
deemed equally beneficial to continue the
present arrangement. The recommenda­
tion has been tabled for the time being.
When announcing the re-appointment of
Lapinski as coach for the 1983 season,
President David Fraser said: “I believe
that the football program can, and will,
be increasingly well integrated into the
College as a whole under the present
system. Tom Lapinski has been an excel­
lent coach. He is a fine teacher, not only
with outstanding technical skill but also
with a remarkable ability to inspire his
players.”
Although Swarthmore has played in­
tercollegiate football at its present scale
for a long time without disproportionate
incidence of serious injury, there has
been concern that the small size of the
MARCH, 1983

squad could compromise the safety of the
players. The fear is that the men might
conceal fatigue or injuries in order to
continue playing, or not report injuries
so frequently as they should to avoid
letting their teammates down. This is a
central concern, and a matter which
impinges on both recruitment and admis­
sions.
David B. Smoyer, chairman of the
Department of Physical Education and
Athletics, observes: “Our low rate of
injury necessarily involves some luck, but
it is also a tribute to the superb condition
of the players.” Thomas Blackburn, pro­
fessor of English and former dean, adds:
“Swarthmore students are too intelligent
to indulge in bravado, and with Doug
Weiss in the training room, they are
doubly protected.”
There is a sense, especially among
people who have been around Swarth­
more for a while, that the integration of
the sports program into the life of the
College isn’t being handled so gracefully
as in the past. Peter Thompson, pro­
fessor of chemistry and faculty advisor
to the football team, recalls the days of
Saturday classes: Chemistry classes met
on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,
with quizzes normally scheduled for the
Saturday sessions. “Lots of times a mem­
ber of the chemistry faculty would ride
the bus with the football players on the
way to a game and give them their quiz
on the way.
“There used to be a kind of elegance in
the way students handled their sports
involvement. I had a student in my
physical chemistry seminar about fifteen
years ago—when jackets and ties were
still worn to class. He came to me one
week and asked if we could have our
seminar break at 3 o’clock instead of
3:30; I said sure. He left on time, re­
turning at about 3:45, still in jacket and
tie, and rejoined the group without com­
ment. I didn’t learn until later that he’d
gone down to the field house and pinned
an opponent in a wrestling match. I can’t
conceive of anything like that happening
now.”
As for the nationally broadcast myth
of Swarthmore not wanting to win,
Bannister summed up for the many fac­
ulty members who like himself attend
most home games: “The suggestion that I
or anybody else would rather see us lose
than win is the craziest idea I’ve ever
heard. People who believe that only show
how completely out of touch they are
with the College.”
Smoyer and many other faculty mem­
bers have been particularly bothered by

the accusation that faculty do not sup­
port the teams. Says Smoyer, “At most
games, I’ve seen from fifteen to thirty
faculty members. That’s pretty impres­
sive, given a total faculty of less than 140,
a certain portion of whom don’t live in
town or are away on leave.”
< Football is not like other sports. For
players and spectators both it has a
unique emotional appeal. Among players
it inspires enormous exhilaration and
camaraderie. “There’s no other sport
which requires team spirit as football
does,” says Thompson. “It’s something
that you simply can’t understand if you
haven’t played on a team.”
Patrick Henry: “One of the problems
that football creates for Swarthmore is
that in terms of national values and
traditions, one’s response to football is
taken as the key to school spirit—one’s
commitment to things other than strict
academics. I haven’t heard anybody get
excited about the fact that Swarthmore’s
tennis team has won the MAC cham­
pionships for the past ten years, and
CBS-TV didn’t come around to ask why
we weren’t excited.”
Referring to the press’s oversimplified
and truncated version of some faculty
members’ attitude toward sports, Henry
continues: “Getting excited about foot­
ball is something that all Americans are
expected to do. Very often the things that
Swarthmore values are things that the
rest of the nation doesn’t get excited
about. Of course we support athletics.
We admire excellence in students in any
field. We are proud of their skills as
debaters, as artists, as scholars. But we
need not be cheering all the time. One of
the things some of the faculty value is the
right to be indifferent to football. Being
indifferent is not to despise it, hate it, or to
want it off campus. They are pleased if
the football team is doing very well, but
they don’t think that is something to get
more excited about than any other group
on campus doing its thing well. Some
people thought the football team was
expecting a special kind of enthusiasm. It
seems to me that the College’s having, per
capita, the second highest number of
National Science Foundation fellowship
winners (after Caltech) five out of the
past seven years is something we have
every right to get as excited about—or be
as indifferent to.”
Peter Thompson: “I’m a little cynical
about all this excitement. People are
talking as though this were the first time
this has ever happened. Remember, we
won the MAC Southern Division cham(Continued on page 26 )
17

A high fivef

Three members o f the newest varsity sport on campus stretch to a “high
fiv e ”after their victory over Dickinson, helped along by Charlotte
Hartley ’84, in action below; Kate Bond ’86 and Emily Rothberg ’83,
warming up; and Coach David Smoyer, giving a half-time critique.
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

e for women’s soccer

ith a 7-6-1 record, the women’s intercollegiate
soccer team signals a spirited “high five” for its
first varsity season. Six years ago two women
who had played soccer in high school and wanted to
continue the sport at college worked out with the men’s
JV team. A year later, in 1978, they and twelve other
women formed a soccer “club” (a designation used by
the Department of Physical Education and Athletics to
denote the status of a sport above an “interest group” but
below “varsity”) and played a three-game schedule. Two
years later thirty women played a nine-game season.
Their dedication, hard work, continuing interest, success
in finding other women’s teams within a reasonable geo­
graphic distance to play, and ability to be competitive
with these teams won them varsity status for the 1982
season.
The rewards for varsity status, explains David B.
Smoyer, associate professor and chairman of the
Department of Physical Education and Athletics, are
more financial support, a coach (although in the case of
women’s soccer, the team had always had a coach), new
uniforms, two officials instead of one at games, pre­
season practice, and opportunity to win awards, such as
letter jackets.
Part of the reason the department requires three years
of club status for any team before it can apply for varsity
status is the added expense and the so-called dilution
factor (additional teams dilute the pool of athletes who
support existing teams), which can be critical in a small
college. Swarthmore now fields four women’s varsity
teams in the fall season: hockey, soccer, tennis, and
volleyball; a cross-country club is applying for
varsity status.
What is the appeal of soccer for these Swarthmore
women? They say it’s fast, aggressive, fluid, and easy
to learn and understand.„Play can be more
I continuous because a minimum of rules results
m in fewer infractions. As one player said, “A lot of
Jbr soccer is pure sports instinct, pure aggression.
Effort is pretty much proportional to success. If you
hustle, try hard, and run a lot, you are going to do
well.” These qualities of the sport mean that women who
had never kicked a soccer ball or who had played only
gym soccer could go out for the team and make it.
How long the inexperienced player will be able to find

W

ÉÉ?

MARCH, 1983

A high five for
women’s soccer
a spot on the new varsity team is questionable. The
desire to better their 7-6-1 record and to insure continu­
ing enthusiasm for the team is pulling coach and players
into recruiting practices engaged in by other varsity
sports. These low-key efforts involve visiting high school
coaches and talking to their players and writing letters to
applicants who have expressed interest in soccer. In spite
of these efforts, Assistant Coach David Weksler ’81
believes “stellar” recruits will be so few in number that
there will still be room on the team for beginners.
With three daughters of alumni on the present team,
the players have this message for other alumni: Send
more soccer players!
— M.O. G.

Top, Assistant Coach David Weksler ’81,
former captain o f the m en’s varsity soccer
team, notes a good play by Patty Pesavento
83, above. Right, pre-game huddle breaks
up with “Let’s go, let’s fight, let’s win!”

Top and left, Liz Varon ’85 and Michele Fowler ’86, along
with teammates and the Dickinson squad shown exchanging
after-game handshakes, typify undergraduate enthusiasm
fo r this fastest growing college sport. Said the New York Times:
“Soccer may well become the game symbolic o f our
most crucial social change-Mthe emergence o f women. ’’

THE
COLLEGE

Richard M. Hurd ’48

Ruth Wilcox Mahler ’49

Five new managers are named to the board
Five new members have been elected to
the Swarthmore Board of Managers.
They are Richard M. Hurd ’48, Ruth
Wilcox Mahler ’49, Barbara Weber
Mather ’65, W. Marshall Schmidt ’47,
and J. Lawrence Shane ’56. Two of the
new managers, Mahler and Schmidt,
were nominated by the Alumni Associ­
ation and are known as Alumni Man­
agers. Shane replaces Richard Willis ’33
as vice chairman of the Board. Both
Willis and Julien Cornell ’30 were named
emeritus members at the group’s De­
cember meeting.
At the same meeting, the Board reap­
pointed Eugene M. Lang ’38 as chairman
and Sue Thomas Turner ’35 as secretary.
Richard M. Hurd ’48 is recently retired
as vice-president/engineering of Bethle­
hem Steel Corporation, where he had
worked since his graduation from the
College.
In 1971 he received the Lehigh Valley
“Distinguished Engineer” award from
the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Penn­
sylvania Society of Professional Engi­
neers. That year he was also elected to the
Association of Iron and Steel Engineers.
He became president of the association in
1976 and continues as a life member.
Hurd served on the board of the Amer­
ican National Metric Council (ANMC)
from the time of its organization in 1973,
and in 1976 became the first chairman of
22

ANMC following the organization’s sep­
aration from the American National
Standards Institute.
Hurd’s other Swarthmore connections
include membership on the Alumni
Council and co-chairmanship of the Col­
lege’s engineering development commit­
tee.
Ruth Wilcox Mahler ’49 was the first
woman president of the Swarthmore
Alumni Association since its reorgani­
zation in 1937, a post she held from 1975
to 1977 after serving a two-year term as
the Association’s vice-president for women.
More recently, as vice-chair of the
Centennial Committee, she helped organ­
ize and oversee the myriad programs of
the year-long celebration of the Alumni
Association’s hundredth birthday.
Mahler has served also as chair of the
Swarthmore Club of Pittsburgh, secretary
of the Alumni Association, and a member
of the Alumni Council.
She is creator and proprietor of Sun ’n
Sand, a beach shop in Stone Harbor,
N.J., and is active in numerous civic
organizations in the Swarthmore and
Wallingford areas.
Barbara Weber Mather ’65 is a partner in
the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper,
Hamilton & Scheetz, where she is en­
gaged in commercial and antitrust litiga­
tion. She is chairman of the firm’s asso­

ciates committee and a member of the
management committee.
In 1977 Mather was appointed by
President Jimmy Carter to the Third
Panel of the United States Circuit Judge
Nominating Commission. She was a
lecturer-at-law at the University of Penn­
sylvania Law School from 1980 through
1982. Mather has served two terms on the
Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission for
Women and is a member of the board of
directors of the National Alumni Associ­
ation of the University of Chicago Law
School, where she received her law degree.
Barbara Mather also served on the
Alumni Council 1972-75 and 1979-82.
W. Marshall Schmidt ’47, a managing
director of the investment banking firm
of W. H. Newbold’s Son & Company of
Philadelphia, served as president of the
Alumni Association from 1971 to 1973.
During his term he organized the first
Alumni College, helped launch the Col­
lege’s student extern program, and re­
stored the traditional five-year reunion
plan to Alumni Weekend.
Schmidt has served also as chair of the
Alumni Fund, president of the Swarth­
more Club of Philadelphia, and more
recently chair of the Life Income and
Bequest Committee.
Director of the Union League of Phila­
delphia, he is also president and director
of the Children’s Country Week AssociSWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

Barbara Weber Mather ’65

W. Marshall Schmidt ’47

J. Lawrence Shane ’56

ation, the oldest summer residential camp
for the underprivileged in America.
Schmidt is a permanent trustee and
past chairman of the Securities Industry
Association Wharton School Committee
and past governor of the Securities In­
dustry Association.

College, effective March 1.
Prime succeeds Lawrence L. Landry,
who resigned last summer to become vice
president of finance and administration
at Southern Methodist University.
In making the announcement of the
appointment at the December meeting of
the Board of Managers, President David
Fraser said, “Swarthmore College is ex­
tremely fortunate to get someone of Jon
Prime’s experience and talents in finan­
cial planning and in the operation of an
educational institution. He has done a
first-rate job as financial planner and
administrator at two high quality institu­
tions.”
“Jon Prime will bring to his work at
Swarthmore an important combination

of talents,” added Eugene M. Lang ’38,
Board chairman. “He has not only con­
siderable expertise and experience in the
world of educational finance but also a
keen understanding of the ethical and
social issues that affect and are affected
by an institution of higher learning.”
Prime has been at St. Louis University
since 1981, after serving in various posi­
tions at the Rochester Institute of Tech­
nology. Most recently, he was R.I.T.’s
vice president for finance and adminis­
tration.
He holds a B.S. degree in business ad­
ministration and accounting from Brad­
ley University and earned his Ed. M.
degree in educational administration from
the University of Rochester.

J. Lawrence Shane ’56, executive vicepresident/financing and planning of Scott
Paper Company, is a former member of
the Board of Managers, having served as
treasurer and vice chairman and on
committees from 1970 to 1981.
Shane joined Scott as a project engineer
following his graduation from Swarthmore with a degree in mechanical en­
gineering. After leaves of absence for
military service in the U.S. Navy and
advanced study at the University of Penn­
sylvania Wharton Graduate School of
Business, he returned to Scott in 1960. He
was named treasurer in 1967 and elected
vice-president/finance in 1971 before as­
suming his present position in 1981.
Shane serves on the boards of the
Philadelphia National Bank, Drexgl
Burnham Bond-Debenture Trading Fund
and Investment Fund, the Wharton Ad­
visory Committee, and the World Affairs
Council.

John Caspar Wister, creator
o f a campus arboretum, dies

College appoints Jon Prime
as vice-president for finance
Jon L. Prime, vice president and chief
financial officer of St. Louis University,
has been named vice president for busi­
ness and finance and treasurer of the
MARCH, 1983

Jon L. Prime

The internationally-renowned dean of
American horticulturists, John Caspar
Wister, died December 27 at his home in
Swarthmore at the age of 95.
At his death Wister was emeritus di­
rector of the Arthur Hoyt Scott Horti­
cultural Foundation of the College and
of the Tyler Arboretum in Lima, Pa.
Among his many honors, he was the
first recipient of four major horticultural
awards: the Liberty Hyde Bailey Medal,
presented by the American Horticultural
Council; the Scott Garden and Horti­
cultural Award; the A.P. Saunders Mem­
orial Medal of the Peony Society, and the
Honor and Achievement Award of the
International Lilac Society.
23

Dr. Wister was director of the Scott
Foundation for forty years, and it was
under his guidance that the Foundation’s
programs were established. His goal was
to create a practical horticultural garden
on the College campus, one including
hardy plants that could be grown without
special care in the climate of eastern
Pennsylvania. Many of the collections
established under his guidance—daffo­
dils, lilacs, rhododendrons, cherries, and
flowering crabs—have a national repu­
tation. Through his efforts the campus
became an arboretum, and many ama­
teur gardeners were encouraged in horti­
culture by this visual demonstration.
For his work with the Scott Founda­
tion and for his many other horticultural
achievements, he received an honorary
Doctor of Science degree from the Col­
lege in 1942.
Dr. Wister is survived by his wife,
Gertrude Smith Wister, a noted horti­
culturist who has been assistant director
of both the Scott Foundation and the
Tyler Arboretum.

College m oves to alleviate
alcohol-related problem s
am ong students
After the University of North Carolina
basketball team won the NCAA cham­
pionship, jubilant fans celebrated by go­
ing on a drinking binge that resulted in
thousands of dollars of property damage
in dormitories and the town of Chapel
Hill.

At the University of South Carolina a
little over a year ago, a student drank too
much and died during a fraternity hazing.
A recent nationwide survey of college
deans commissioned by the Chronicle o f
Higher Education indicated that 15.4
percent of students at private liberal arts
colleges drink excessively, and that nearly
20 percent of these students have to leave
college because of their alcohol problems.
At Swarthmore, while students’ prob­
lems with alcohol pale in comparison to
reports like those above from around the
country, officials agree that there is suf­
ficient cause to be concerned about alco­
hol abuse on campus.
Citing failure of students to deal with
stress and social pressure, Dean Janet
Dickerson said, “It’s [drinking] become a
problem of increasing concern across the
country and to us at Swarthmore. When
we sat down to analyze the incidents of
vandalism and other behavior problems
among students on campus, we found
that a significant number of them—
about 80 percent—were alcohol related.”
Trying to alleviate the problem before
it becomes serious, Dean Dickerson,
along with several student organizations,
has taken steps to cut down on the
availability of hard liquor on campus.
The Club, the student-run nightclub in
the basement of Tarble Social Center,
has stopped serving hard alcoholic drinks.
Club co-director Bruce Griesenbeck ’83
said, “We’re trying to make it a place that
will attract a wider crowd. We don’t want
it to be a bar, a place where people come
just to drink.”
The Budget Committee of Student

THE END OF THE LINE: The railroad trestle, scene o f legendary undergraduate escapades
through the decades, is currently undergoing extensive repairs. Spanning Crum Creek, the
trestle links sections o f track between Swarthmore and Wallingford. Trains operating on the
Media Local line are now being halted at Swarthmore and passengers traveling farther west
must continue by bus. Trestle repairs should be completed by October.
24

Council has sharply reduced the amount
of money available for social events
which feature open bars, finding such
expense “an inequitable way to spend the
student activities fund money.”
According to Dean Dickerson, efforts
to work with students through conven­
tional “alcohol education programs” have
proven inadequate. Social pressures are
far too potent, and posters and earnest
speeches produce no tangible results.
“What has been most useful,” she said,
“is more direct tactics, including attempts
to change the nature of parties. We’re
trying to get students to register their
parties, urging planners and organizers
to serve food more substantial than pret­
zels, and we’re particularly trying to
emphasize the need for supplying attrac­
tive, alternative beverages.”
Most of these suggestions run counter
to the prevailing social fashion, which
favors drinking, so few of them have met
with enthusiasm.
Said the Dean, “Although excessive
drinking is not a major problem on
campus, all of us are working on con­
tinuing efforts to help students learn to
deal more responsibly with alcohol. This,
too, is part of education.”

M usic and D ance Festival
returns for a second year
The second Swarthmore Music and
Dance Festival will take place on campus
June 10-25. It is being expanded to three
weekends of concerts, dance perform­
ances, and a series of master classes in
dance, piano, viola, and voice for area
students of the performing arts.
James D. Freeman, director of the
Festival, announced that headliners will
include Edward Villella, one of Amer­
ica’s most celebrated dancers; Jan De
Gaetani, mezzo soprano; Lillian Fuchs,
violist; Dan Wagoner and his dance
company; Joseph De Pasquale, principal
violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra;
pianist Lili Kraus, who returns this year
to perform Mozart; and Gilbert Kalish,
famed chamber pianist.
The Festival schedule also includes
world premieres of works by Richard
Wernick, Pulitzer Prize winning com­
poser at the University of Pennsylvania;
a newly discovered work by Arnold
Schoenberg; and a choreography by Dan
Wagoner, along with Philadelphia area
premieres of works by George Rochberg
and Arne Running.
For further information write to the
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

A t ceremonies dedicating the new Cornell Science and Engineering Library, Julien and
Virginia Stratton Cornell (both o f the Class o f 1930) were presented with a commemorative
photograph album by the College’s Science Librarian, Emi Horikawa (center). The album
contains photographs o f the library in various stages o f construction, from groundbreaking in
June, 1981, to its completion in August, 1982.
The dedication was the occasion fo r speeches and reminiscences by the Cornells; President
David Fraser; Horikawa; David Bowler, professor o f engineering and chairman o f the Division
o f Natural Sciences; Beverley Bond Potter ’55, president o f the Associates o f the Swarthmore
College Libraries; and undergraduate Susan D. Stocker ’85. College Librarian Michael J.
Durkan was master o f ceremonies, and a musical interlude was provided by the Swarthmore
College Early Music Ensemble.

Swarthmore Music and Dance Festival,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA
19081.

Regional phonathons are
a success, thanks to a host
o f enthusiastic volunteers
In a matter of five short weeks, more than
$93,000 in pledges from 1,360 individuals
was raised for the Annual Fund by
alumni and parents during Swarthmore’s
fall regional phonathon campaign. En­
thusiastic volunteers and an expanded
regional schedule account for the overall
success. In addition to Boston, New
York, and Washington, D.C.—previous
phonathon sites—callers gathered in Chi­
cago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and
San Francisco.
Alumni and students spanning sixand-a-half decades—from Jake Nevyas
’19 to Victoria Jordan ’85—called class­
mates and other alumni to solicit contri­
butions for the 1982-83 Annual Fund.
Even Chloe Rutter, prospective class of
1991, offered a helping hand in the San
Francisco phonathon, assisting her moth­
MARCH, 1983

er, Elisabeth ’63, in making calls. A
special accolade is deserved by the Class
of ’65, which provided the most partici­
pants in all regions, five of whom served
as chairpeople.
A great deal of College news was
exchanged—David Fraser’s appointment
as Swarthmore’s twelfth president, the
upcoming June reunion weekend, the
affiliation of New York alumni with the
Cornell Club, alumni receptions in Cal­
ifornia, and of course, Swarthmore’s
incredible football team!
Alumni volunteers served as chair­
persons in each of the seven cities. Special
thanks go to: Glen Kanwit ’65, Chicago;
C. Russell ’47 and Edith de Burlo ’50 and
Janet Lundquist Steere ’56, Boston; Da­
vid Rowley ’65, Philadelphia; Jacqueline
Collins (co-chairperson of the Swarth­
more Parents Association), Donald Fujihira ’69, Sandra Spewock ’73, and Sally
Ann Warren ’65, New York; John Gold­
man ’71 and co-chairperson Hans Treuenfels ’63, San Francisco; Yolande Erickson
’77 and William Robinson III ’60, Los
Angeles; and Thomas and Bevra Krattenmaker, both ’65, Washington, D.C.
For the first time, parents were invited

to participate in regional phonathons.
Many of them welcomed the chance to
speak with fellow parents who share
similar concerns. A total of $4,658 was
pledged by 90 parents. In the New York
City Phonathon, Walter Wheeler, father
of Adam ’84, won that night’s prize for
raising the largest total of specified
pledges to the Annual Fund.
The results from these fourteen nights
of phoning were encouraging. More than
half of the alumni and parents contacted
made pledges to the Fund, pledging a
total of $93,000 (which does not antici­
pate corporate matching gifts). Perhaps
more impressive than the grand total is
the sum of $30,000 in new and increased
pledges, representing 32 percent of total
committed. Of those who indicated spe­
cific pledges, 53 percent (or 722 donors)
increased their gift over previous levels.
The Fund also welcomed pledges from
105 individuals who will be new donors
in 1982-83. This will provide a healthy
boost to the percentage of alumni partic­
ipation.
Challenges also played an integral part
in the success of the program. Anony­
mous challengers from the ’60s and ’70s
encouraged new and increased gifts. For
alumni of the ’60s, the challengers agreed
to match dollar-for-dollar any gift con­
tributed by a member of the Classes of
’60-’70 who had not contributed in the
previous year, and any increased gift
made to the 1981-82 Annual Fund. Alum­
ni who graduated in ’71-’81 were issued a
slightly different challenge: The challeng­
er offered to match dollar-for-dollar (up
to $100) the gift of anyone from those
classes who had not contributed to the
1981-82 Annual Fund.
Phonathons are increasingly impor­
tant to Swarthmore’s Annual Giving
program. Not only are they an effective
way of raising support, but they help
achieve more extensive and effective com­
munication among alumni, parents, and
the College.

In March and April, alumni, parents,
and students again have the opportunity
to raise gifts for the Fund during the
Annual Campus Phonathon. Alumni/
parent phoning is scheduled for March
21st-April 14th. Volunteers are welcome
to join in what should prove to be an
exciting and productive series of eve­
nings. If you wish to participate, either
call (215-447-7410) or drop a note to the
Annual Funds Office, Swarthmore Col­
lege, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
25

Fall sports: W om en’s tennis
and m en’s cross country shine
Although football caught much of the
limelight and women’s soccer gained
varsity status, other team sports flour­
ished (and triumphed!) during the fall.
In women’s tennis, the team brought
MAC honors to Swarthmore, first cap­
turing the South crown and then winning
the whole championship by defeating the
Northern winners of the University of
Scranton by a score of 9-0. The season
record of ten wins and five losses was
characterized by outstanding play by
Belgian sisters Alice ’85 and Yvonne
Esselen ’85, at No. 1 and No. 2 singles.
The men’s cross-country team finished
with a 9-3 record and placed fourth in the
MAC championship—the best showing
since 1974. The team was led all season by
the one-two punch of Ethan Landis ’84
and Robert Neff ’85.
The women’s cross-country club fin­
ished with a season record of eight wins
and nine losses. Leading the team this
year as she did last year was sophomore
Sarah Sangree.
Men’s soccer struggled to a 3-10-1
record, a frustrating season for first-year
coach Curt Lauber.
The youth and inexperience of this
year’s field hockey team was frequently
evident this season. Nevertheless, the
women came away with a respectable
record of six wins and eight losses.
The women’s volleyball team started
off slowly but finished with an 8-11
record, winning five of their last seven
matches.
— Deborah Crabbe,
Sports Information Director

Letitia M cHose Wolverton ’13
leaves $2 million endowment
Letitia McHose Wolverton ’13, a woman
who loved, taught, and helped students
for decades, has left a trust and a bequest
which together exceed $2 million to
endow a series of scholarships.
For many years before her death in
October, 1981, Mrs. Wolverton had given
generously to the College to support a
scholarship program bearing her name
“for members of the junior and senior
classes who have proved to be capable
students and have need for financial
assistance to complete their education at
Swarthmore College.”
According to Vice-President Kendall
Landis, this is the second largest gift ever
26

Will success spoil Swarthmore?
McCabe Memorial Fellowship
to Harvard Business School
Young alumni who are interested
in going to Harvard Business School
are eligible to apply for the Thomas
B. McCabe, Jr., and Yvonne Motley
McCabe Memorial Fellowship. This
award provides a stipend of $3,000
toward the first year at HBS. Appli­
cations and letters of recommen­
dation should be made to David
Cowden, Chairman, Swarthmore
College Committee on Fellowships
and Prizes, to arrive not later than
March 21, 1983. In selecting the
recipient, the committee follows
standards comparable to those of the
McCabe Achievement Awards, giv­
ing special consideration to appli­
cants who have demonstrated supe­
rior qualities of leadership.
Application forms are available
from Mr. Cowden on request. Ad­
mission to Harvard Business School
is a prerequisite for being chosen for
this fellowship.

(Continued from page 17 )

pionship two years in a row—in 1965 and
1966. If you look back a number of years,
football at Swarthmore was very suc­
cessful, very popular. We were the envy
of the small college circuit. Then we went
through a difficult period—the Viet-nam
War and discontent with the ‘system.’
That was an anti-football (anti a lot of
things!) time. Much of the College com­
munity—many alumni especially—were
disturbed about that.
“So, the College went out and hired
Tom Lapinski to do exactly what he’s
done—build a respectable winning team.
He wasn’t told to go around the country
and find potential Ph.D.’s who could
double as fullbacks. He’s a local man
with excellent local connections, no re­
cruiting staff to speak of, and very little
time or money to play with. Swarthmore
gave him the resources to recruit in a
limited geographical area. Which he did.
“Our program is tremendously admired
by area coaches. They see it as practically
a miracle and, frankly, so do I.”
Looking back, there are many positive
elements to be gleaned from the ex­
made to the College for endowed scholar­ citement and upheaval of the past two
ships and will have a great impact on the football seasons. David Smoyer notes:
College’s ability to provide scholarships “The self-examination and scrutiny from
for students in need.
others to which we have been subjected
“As federal aid decreases,” said Laura throughout this controversial period have
T. Alperin, director of Financial Aid, been, in the end, healthy for us all. The
“we are more and more dependent on the focus of the media’s spotlight on Swarth­
generosity of alumni and friends to assure more—although harsh at times—has re­
that no academically able student who sulted in a generally positive picture of
demonstrates financial need will be de­ the College to outsiders and a much great­
nied admission or will be unable to er national awareness of Swarthmore.
remain in school for economic reasons.”
President Fraser observes: “The best
Currently 42 percent of the student spirit of amateurism survives in Swarth­
body is receiving some kind of assistance— more athletics and we are much the richer
some $2 million of which comes directly for it. As a newcomer to the campus I
from College funds.
sense the respect for skills, delight in the
After receiving her degree in Latin, collective accomplishments of teamwork,
Letitia Wolverton taught for several years the drive to win, resilience in the face of
in Clinton, N.J. She married there and defeat, and grace at the moment of
was very active in community affairs, victory. It is not easy to maintain this
later serving three terms on the school spirit when we live in a wider society that
board. During World War II she became so clearly overvalues athletic prowess
active in the American Red Cross and and accomplishment. Might it not be just
spent the remainder of the war years as a the Swarthmore penchant for inquiry
volunteer at the Veterans Administration and criticism—which, when oversimpli­
in Washington, D.C.
fied, appears humorous to those outside
Mrs. Wolverton always remained close the campus—which preserves that spirit
to Swarthmore and served many years as by reminding us that athletics are a
a class agent. In addition to her bequest source of pride but not the most impor­
for scholarships, she provided a $25,000 tant things we do? Amateurism flourishes
gift to the Scott Horticultural Founda­ here not despite the spirit of criticism but
tion.
because of it. Long live them both!”
SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN

March, 1983 / Second-class postage paid at Swarthmore, PA 19081 and additional mailing offices

Swarthmore College Bulletin

In this issue:
3 bed, 2 bth, soir ht, with
unlimited vu
6 America s First Woman
in Space
8 They Played Sky High
14 Will Success Spoil
Swarthmore?
18 A High Five for
Women’s Soccer
22 The College
27 Class Notes

Jum p
Sallv K. Ride 72

Cover: Quarterback Mike
Reil ’84 rolls out for a pass
during the game against
Western Maryland. Photo by
J. Martin Natvig.

Rush

The Garnet Tide, amid a blaze
of publicity, swept to a national
ranking of eight. Pages 8 and 14.

Orbit

Want to get away from it
all? Gerard K. O’Neill ’50,
Hon. 78, has a fascinat­
ing suggestion. See page 1.

Kick
Women’s soccer, now enjoying
varsity status, is off to a
rousing start. Page 18.
return to the campus for an event-filled Alumni
A nd Iplan toWeekend
on June 4 and 5. In addition to perennial
favorites such as the Grand Parade, Alumni Collection, and a family picnic on the front
lawn, your reunion chairmen are planning special private parties for returning reunion
classes. See your old friends and meet President David Fraser and his wife Barbara.